SBND observes first neutrinos - how we got here and where we're going

Neutrinos are the second most-abundant, the lightest of the massive, and possibly the most physicist-headache-inducing particles in the Universe. They are extremely hard to detect and when we did detect them, we often found they did not behave like we expected. The most recent example are the so-called short-baseline anomalies. Several experiments have observed effects that, if interpreted as oscillations, would be incompatible with the three neutrino flavours we know, and would require a new, sterile, neutrino state to exist. The short-baseline neutrino program at Fermilab aims to finally resolve the question of short-baseline oscillations by using a multiple detector setup and liquid argon time projection chamber detectors to precisely determine the existence of the sterile neutrino. The short-baseline-near detector (SBND) has recently come online as the final detector in this setup and has observed first neutrino interactions. In this talk I will describe the path to get there, show the first events and plots demonstrating the performance of the detector as well as the future plans of the SBND experiment and SBN Programme.

Event resources